A Living Art, Part 2

January 27, 2008

This is the second posting on the bioarts, a relatively new field in which artists are using living tissue and organisms to create their works. I offered a glimpse into the world of bioart in my previous article, and will now look at some of the ethical issues at stake before turning to my own vision for bioaesthetics.

The Ethics of Bioart

Art, like any aspect of society, must continually change or risk becoming stagnant and irrelevant to its culture. This is true of all art forms, whether bioarts or more “conventional” ones like film, sculpture, and literature. These days, though, it seems that artists particularly enjoy pushing out the frontiers of their mediums in order to arrest their audiences (and to make a name for themselves in the art world).

Along these lines, the mantra that I think describes bioartists best is “the sky is the limit.” Mouse cells employed to create a tiny jacket? Sure! Graft a living ear onto a person’s forearm? Why not? It seems that bioartists at this point are more interested in the novelty of their experiments than in conveying any meaningful content – or ascribing to any ethical standards in their practices.

While the various grotesques that are emerging from bioartists’ workshops may be created and destroyed at will, the artists themselves declare that they are against the abuse of our environment and its living species for the sake of profit. Carol Gigliotti, an art educator and media theorist, has done an excellent job of highlighting the contradictions in this approach, which she summarized in a phone interview with NPR:

I feel like [bio]artists at this point are mirroring what’s happening. I don’t feel they are encouraging shifts to new levels of consciousness.

Furthermore, significant ethical boundaries are crossed when artists start turning animals and even humans into works of art. Like using people’s foreheads to advertise products, these bioartists treat their subjects like living billboards for their ideas. And bioartists go well beyond the skin-deep transformations of tattoo artists: many create their works by invoking dramatic surgical and genetic changes in their subjects. It is not only presumptuous but also ethically repugnant for bioartists to consider their legacy and “right to expression” so important that they feel free to conscript other living creatures for their art experiments.

So, what should characterize good bioart, and what does artistic and ethical integrity look like in a world where there are few practical limits to the ways that life can be altered through biotechnology? These important questions are at the start of bioaesthetics, which I will discuss further in my next posting.